Even if you are just a ‘fly-by-night’ websurfer, you would have often come across the word RSS with an accompanying symbol that looks like this .
Expanded, it can be read 2 ways- either as Really Simple Syndication (the more popular, modern-day version) or its precursor, Rich Site Summary. So, why the different names? Somewhere between the first and subsequent versions of the RSS, a lot of coding and business decisions were taken by which the original developers, Netscape, found itself, ipso facto, out of the picture. See, the way the original RSS (Rich Site Summary) was written by the guys at Netscape, it was meant for use on My.Netscape.com portal in 1999. Shorn of the techie stuff, we can tell you that the idea was to syndicate all the information about a particular website to make it easily available to all those who wanted it. But even as the Rich Site Summary guys at Netscape were getting their act together, Netscape decided to scrap the RSS and all tools associated with it in 2001 when it was acquired by AOL, or the former America On Line. A big mistake when you look at it in hindsight. Because the ‘original’ RSS popularity had caught on by then and many had started using it. First generation RSS developers started working in 2 different groups on the programme under the nomenclatures, the RSS-Dev Working Group and UserLand Software (comprising one of the original guys to have made RSS). The aim was common - to better the RSS. The re-worked version, without any help from Netscape, was released in 2002 with the re-worked name, Really Simple Syndication. Because of the previous “mess”, as of 2009, there were officially 3 versions of the RSS on the Internet.
But the purpose of this tutorial is not only to focus on the history of the RSS’ development but to make our readers understand what exactly can you do with the RSS or how to use it? Actually, many of you must have heard of a news ticker or wire agencies from the ‘Real World’. These are basically news services that provide you the news of the day, minute on minute, on a special machine (now you can get these on your PCs directly). The RSS is kinda its online version. It is a format wherein you can syndicate (make available to many) content. Then, it could be Content such as news, or community news or sports developments or even music downloads, or what-may-have-you. There are two ways this system works:
a) Uploading or feeding the Content on to the RSS feeder
b) Downloading it for reading through the RSS reader
For example, the BBC or the ABC may want X website to put up their stories every day so that in addition to the BBC or ABC loyalists, the readers of X website, too, can get to read the stories. For that, BBC or ABC will request X website to display the BBC RSS on its site. This is called an RSS Reader/Aggregator. In the case of the BBC, it will install a client-based application on X website. But there are 2 other ways of installing a RSS Reader – by using a Plugin for your browser or webscript (code) that runs on a website. But please note, that without a Reader, it is not possible to read the feed.
On part of the BBC or the ABC or any other News site or website wanting to upload to the RSS, there are many softwares called RSS feed generators, editor and submitters. Some are free while you need to pay to get others. These are needed to load the Contenton the RSS feed so that readers can then read it.
In 2003-04, some bright spark designed the Atom format of web feed as an alternate to the RSS, but more of that in our next tutorial.
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